Tony Prediction: Broadway Comes Alive…On Video. The Week in New York Theater.

I predict people will party, parry and Tweet during the 69th annual Tony Awards Sunday night, and that there will be no more viewers than last year’s average of 7.02 million, but those who watch will have fun!

Predictions are as much a part of the annual Tony Awards celebration as the opening number. I’m not sure why people aren’t just willing to wait.

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

“Everybody should fall in love. It’s like voting: It’s a right we all should have,” Jo’s co-worker says to her in “Nice Girl,” a play by Melissa Ross at Labyrinth Theater that, like “The Way We Get By” by Neil LaBute at Second Stage, is about unlikely/unlucky people falling awkwardly in love.

Both plays — the first largely a drama with many funny moments; the other a comedy with some touching moments — remind me of specific older love stories about regular Joes, at least at their start. Both have plot twists I could have done without. But the flaws in both scripts are masked by smooth direction (by two women directors), and by some lovely performances by the would-be couples — Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski in “The Way We Get By,” and Kathryn Kates and Nick Cordero (as well as the two other performers) in “Nice Girl.”

As a movie actor, Jesse Eisenberg is going from playing a jerk (Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) to a supervillain (Lex Luthor in next year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.) But in The Spoils, as with his two previous Off-Broadway plays (such as the rude, self-involved pothead and young but over-the-hill novelist he played opposite Vanessa Redgrave in The Revisionist), Eisenberg is sticking with depicting a jerk.

Basic questions such as the origin of the universe – Big Bang Theory vs. Divine Creation – may fiercely divide the world, but on stage at Studio 54, they are a source of jokes by Jim Parsons as the Almighty in An Act of God, a play whose own origin is less than cosmic: It began life as a Twitter feed.

The Week in Pre-Tony Videos

Broadway performers in Stars in the Alley:

Broadway Dancing – with extensive excerpts from the musicals Tony-nominated for best choreography On The Town, The King and I, Something Rotten, and An American in Paris.